Video: Protecting your RSS feeds

There are many ways to prevent content scrapers from stealing your feed content, but the Copyright Feed plug-in is one of the best. It protects your feed content by adding copyright information, a unique digital fingerprint, and more. In this screencast, we'll set it up and see it in action. Before installing the Copyright Feed plug-in, let's go to the Add New Plugins page and check it out. We click on Add New in the Plugins menu and then type in the 'copyright feed' in the search field. Click Search to view the results, and here we see (c)Feed listed as the second result.

This course explains how to secure self-hosted WordPress sites, including site configuration, code modification, and the use of free plug-ins. Beginning with the basics of site security, author Jeff Starr explains how to harden a WordPress site by configuring authentication keys, setting proper file permissions, and removing version numbers. The course shows how to implement a firewall, prevent automated spam, and control proxy access, and concludes with a series of advanced tips and site security best practices.

Protecting your RSS feeds

There are many ways to prevent content scrapers from stealing your feed content,but the Copyright Feed plug-in is one of the best.It protects your feed content by adding copyright information, a unique digitalfingerprint, and more.In this screencast, we'll set it up and see it in action.Before installing the Copyright Feed plug-in, let's go to the Add New Pluginspage and check it out.We click on Add New in the Plugins menu and then type in the 'copyright feed' inthe search field. Click Search to view the results, and here we see (c)Feedlisted as the second result.

Click on Details to learn more.It says it has not been tested with the current version of WordPress, but thecurrent version of Word press is 3.1.3, which is very close to what we have here.I run this plug-in on one of my own sites and can assure you it works just fine.The plug-in has been downloaded almost 30,000 times, and the author isreputable and well known.It also has an excellent rating based on a fair number of votes.So let's click on the Installation tab to see what installation looks like.

As we can see, this is typical, and since we already have the latest versioninstalled, let's go ahead and close out of the Information panel and click theCopyright Feed link in the Settings menu to configure the plug-in.Here we are at the Copyright Feed Settings page.Here, we have the main menu, which gives a good overview of what the plug-in cando, but let's jump right in with the setting up of the main options.This is the copyright notice that will be displayed in your feeds.

Feel free to customize this to suit your needs.Next, grab a copy of the randomly generated authentication key and paste itinto this field here.This will be your unique digital fingerprint.If you'd rather use your own authentication key then you may do so bysimply entering it here.And the second part of the copyright notice, this part will appear after thedigital fingerprint.Scrolling down a little bit further, we check this box to show alerts on the dashboard.

Here, we check to auto-scan for stolen content, than set a reasonable amount oftime for each of the auto-scans and here, check this box to exclude your sitefrom the scan results.For Feedreader IP, we check this box to include our IP with the results.For Short Feed, let's just leave that at the default settings.These next three sections here are for blocking the sites that are stealing ourfeed, and there's also a place to leave a custom message for people who try toaccess your site after they've been blocked.

Scrolling through the other options, we see that we can include comments andrelated posts in our feeds.These are two great features that unfortunately are beyond the scope of this tutorial.Getting near the end here, this preview shows you what the plug-in willactually add to your feed.It will change once we update our settings.And here and here, the plug-in provides some quick search links for finding stolencontent, and finally, the button to Update Options, which we now click to save our changes.

With everything configured, we return to the public side of the demo site andscroll down a bit to click on the Entries RSS link, where we can check thateverything is working by viewing the source code of this page.Right-clicking on the page in Firefox, we select View Page Source and scrolldown to the end of the first post.Here is the copyright information, as specified in the Plugin Settings page.This information will now be included with every post in your feed.

Here is the next post, and here is the copyright message, and so on.This information will now be included with every post in your feed, enabling youto periodically search the web to find any stolen content.Let's see a quick example of this process.We return to the Plugin Settings page and copy our unique digital fingerprint.Then we go to our favorite search engine and paste that into place.

After clicking the Search button, we see that Google has found a result.Clicking on the result, we see that this site has stolen the Hello world!post from our demo site's RSS feed.We can now use this site's IP address to stop this site from stealing future content.To do so, first obtain the IP address of the site that's stealing our content.There are several ways to get the IP information, but the easiest is to use oneof these handy add-ons for Firefox.

Here is the Show IP add-on that we have installed in this browser.To obtain the IP address of the site that's stealing our feed content,right-click in the lower-right corner of the browser and select Copy to Clipboard.Next, return to the Copyright Feed Settings page in the Admin and scroll down tothe BlackList field.There, paste the IP information into place and then scroll down to click UpdateOptions to save our changes.

This IP is now blocked from even accessing our site,so it's an excellent way to stop them from stealing future content from our feeds.Once your content has been posted on another site, you'll need to file a DMCAnotice to have it removed from the search engines, but you can stop the samesite from stealing future posted content using this method.By no means does this strategy win the war on content theft, but it does giveyou the upper hand when responding to known scrapers and content thieves.

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